


One of Our Spies is Missing

by chasing_givenchy



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Belligerent Sexual Tension, Brainwashing, F/M, Intrigue, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chasing_givenchy/pseuds/chasing_givenchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The KGB has only so many resources. We are experiencing a period of some… shortages. Occasionally, I loan my operatives to Department 13. Sometimes, they are returned to me in pine boxes. It is an acceptable risk.”</p><p>When Moscow reclaims one of their own as the perfect killing machine, how far will U.N.C.L.E. go to get him back?</p>
            </blockquote>





	One of Our Spies is Missing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lirazel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/gifts).



> HOLY CRAP IT’S DECEMBER 25th AND YOU’RE READING THIS. Dear Yuletide recipient, I don’t have the words for just how much fun it was to write your request. Jingle bells and New Year’s fireworks were going off in my head the second I read your prompts (my whole brain was scheming to write a single fic that incorporated them all). I hope this comes even a little close to what you had in mind and that you have a wonderful year ahead ♥
> 
> INCREDIBLE, INTENSE, UNSTOPPABLE, ANIME-SPARKLY-EYES-WATERFALL-TEARS LEVELS OF GRATITUDE FOR [fakeplasticlily](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fakeplasticlily). Without you + a cupcake shop + red frosting ladybugs, this would literally not exist.
> 
> Mad levels of appreciation and ♥ for [merle_p](http://archiveofourown.org/users/merle_p), my most patient and awesomesauce beta-reader.
> 
> Fic title is taken from a _Man From U.N.C.L.E._ film; the spelling of Illya’s name is also from that canon. References to the grandmaster of Cold War-era CIA spy fiction pop up on occasion. Some research fail occurs, for which I can only apologise and ask for your suspension of disbelief.

The canal, bulging at its banks, had been rocking the barge all night, but the booted pair of feet brushed the deck with practised ease. The rest of the man lowered himself from the bridge above, landing in a soundless crouch. He crept towards the boat’s cabin, indistinct from his own shadow in the driving rain. His workman’s cap warped his silhouette into a beaked bird of prey.

He paused beside the brightly lit porthole. Amsterdam had hunkered down for the night all around him. His palm, scarred and callused, broad as a dishpan, ghosted over the lock. A second later, the door swung open at a flick from his index and middle fingers.

Inside, the barge was crammed full of sinks, fridges and empty beer bottles. The trash compactor grunted in fits and starts, alternating with a man’s snores. Ella Fitzgerald soared from the record player over the creak of floorboards under the operative’s boots.

The mark was barely balanced against the edge of the sweat-stained mattress; his eyes were rolling wildly behind his closed lids. A single raindrop struggled to cling to the operative’s sleeve as he gently reached around the sleeping man. Ella sounded a thousand miles away, curling him into her sweetly intimate embrace. The operative whipped the bedsheet around the mark’s neck.

Dark brown eyes snapped open, flashing blank and white. The dying man’s mouth parted in a gurgling scream. The operative pulled harder and the end came with an audible crack.

As the operative bent to wipe his hands on the bedsheet, he heard someone say, “Illya.” Her voice was husky and low, but the word was unmistakable. “How nice to see you.”

 

Waverley had said Kuryakin wasn’t “theirs” anymore. He had softened the blow by pretending months of diplomacy and manipulating circumstances gave him some sense of proprietorship over one of his many pawns, but Gaby hadn’t understood. After Istanbul, her lungs had been aching from being shoved face-first into the water under an aqueduct and Solo was packing gauze into the bullet hole in his shoulder. She had fuzzy memories of sunlight glinting off golden hair and blinding her, of stubble razing against her kiss. There had been a wireless radio earpiece and it was smaller than his thumbnail when he reached up to remove it. A wince had jumped across his face, and his hand tightened into a fist. That had been her last clear memory of Istanbul anyway.

“Moscow, of course, gave him to us on loan. That was understood from the start.”

Language barrier. Gaby, of course, knew all about that. Illya used to painstakingly correct the Russian she picked up from him (ungrammatical curses and threats), but there were times he forgot himself. He’d mumble a mouthful, and his gaze would slip down the contours of her face, watching her lips move when she parroted some back.

“ _Zvyozdochka moya_?”

“You… It means you are wise. For chop shop girl who drinks too much pomegranate juice and pets stray cats.”

It was only a short jump from the lying to the almost killing. The stray cat had wriggled out of her arms to jump on him, a claw swiping for a perch. It cut twin lines into his forearm and the worn leather strap of his father’s watch. And then everything went red.

“The Reds _are_ a tricky bunch of devils. It stands to reason they wouldn’t let Kuryakin go without installing a little safety valve first.”

“A safety valve. Wonderful. Maybe you’d like to reveal your containment plan, preferably _before_ Peril lays waste to half of Europe. I’m sure he’s wiping out Spain as we speak.”

 

“Why did you kill him?”

Immobile on the deck of the barge, he was still watching Gaby. Her greeting mockery had only thunked against his empty skull. It slicked down his face like rain. The cabin door swung helplessly in the wind behind her, but her body tingled, needle-like, under the intensity of his stare.

“ _Say_ something.”

A flicker of something blue and alive moved behind his open eyes.

“You’re not yourself. _Illya_.” The bitterness in that name could poison presidents. She saw the tension run through him like a current. Her own breath was clenched in her throat, the way his breath stuck too when he looked at her. “You’re not—Illya.”

He blinked.

In an instant, his gaze focused past her shoulder, at the bridge looming overhead. He was cut adrift in another solar system, where the bridge was the sun and he had centred himself around it. Gaby was cannonballing into him before he could finish calculating the jump.

She slammed him into the railing of the boat, the metal bar smashing the back of his head. He started to slump against the slushy deck. Her fist came swinging down to knock the last bit of consciousness out of his eyes. Her knuckles smacked into his open palm.

Illya’s lips twisted in a tiny smile. _I like my women strong_. She tried to wrench herself free, but he was twisting her arm behind her back, the sinew twining like taffy in his grip. She swiped at his exposed eyes and his hand blurred before it closed around her throat.

Pressure exploded in black fireworks at the top of Gaby’s head. His smile snapped off as her tongue swelled, something ballooning in the inside of her mouth. _Air_. Her lower body felt like sandbags being cut loose from the rest of her. Her right arm collapsed to her side. A muscle jumped in her shin.

“Illya,” she tried to say. Stars were swimming behind her eyelids. “ _Zvezda_ —”

He let go.

Scrabbling as she fell, Gaby struck. Her good hand jabbed knife-like into the hollow of his throat. She heard an involuntary gasp, wound around what might have been a curse or her name, and she crumpled onto the deck.

Illya towered over her; his face was obscured by shadow and rain; the dial of his father’s watch was clear as the moon. Although she was half out of her mind, she thought he was looking at her with naked surprise. She didn’t hesitate, using the distraction to kick his legs out from under him. The slippery ground sent him flying, but he half-spun to grab hold of the railing behind him. She lunged forward, but he had dived overboard.

She heaved for breath as he was reduced to a pale smear thrashing through the canal. He didn’t look back. But if people had eyes at the back of their head, she knew he was watching her. The certainty made her shudder.

*

Raindrops were collecting sullenly in the ‘D’STAM JESSE’ engraved on the façade of the safe house. One rolled down the bridge of Gaby’s nose as she stood in the entryway, trying to clutch her bearings to herself. _I encountered Kuryakin_. _Turov’s dead_. A third-storey window was open, a pair of striped sock-clad feet poking out. She removed the umbrella that blocked the springlock action of the front door and shouldered her way inside. Reflexively sidestepping the patch of carpet where Hachiko the Frog usually sat, she decided not to rehearse the debriefing in her head after all.

Gaby had almost reached the first landing when Solo barrelled downstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Tie flung over his shoulder, he had a bottle of champagne tucked into one hand and a paperback under his arm. She was about to protest the wanton abuse of Moët when he pivoted the corner and snatched her up with him as he went.

“By any chance,” he asked, “does that umbrella conceal a sword?”

“No. But I have a Mauser.”

Solo looked as if Christmas had come early. Gaby took the opportunity to free her mangled right arm from his grasp, and peer up the banister. Three storeys high and it was all clear. “There are some nice gentlemen we should show that to,” he could be heard as saying, just as a decorative mahogany newel burst into splinters.

Gaby yanked him down to avoid the second burst of gunfire that flew through where their heads had been, and came back to ricochet.

“Maybe a grenade would impress them more,” amended Solo, a touch disappointed.

She didn’t stop to commiserate. She put her strength into the front door, which tended to stick in the moisture-swollen frame, and felt it give just as there was the loud thump of a man vaulting over the banister and landing sure-footed on the ground floor.

“I’ll take care of this,” Solo promised, whirling around with impressive suddenness and flicking his paperback at the gunman’s eye.

 

“Hell has a special place,” said Solo, “for those who did what we just did.” He was referring to their extremely inappropriate use of a wagon, fizzy bubbles, and a bucket of tulips in their escape from the city. Gaby’s knuckles tightened around the steering wheel of the beat-up Mitsubishi Colt as it wobbled and bumped over the country road. “I hope Peril doesn’t hear about it from that unfortunate fellow. I still want him to respect us in the morning.”

The car flew over a small boulder smack-bang in the middle of the road that the driver had failed to notice. She remained equally oblivious to the canal dirt and blood that had started drying on her pullover. It enveloped her in a bear hug, stitches already starting to come apart from the wear and tear. Any more, and it would soon be clear that the garment had originally been tailored for an ogre.

“Do we have any sustenance in here?” asked Solo, craning around in his seat to inspect the back of the car. “I used up the last of the Charlie Champers as disinfectant.” From the rearview mirror, Gaby wasn’t sure if the previous (legitimate) owner had been a serial killer or a lumberjack.

“There’ll be plenty once we find a motel,” she snapped. “You can complain about the quality of the Beluga caviar there.”

Solo made a humming noise that she deeply distrusted. A truck bellowed past, canvas flapping on the back like a flag. The end of the road was nowhere in sight, and if there _was_ a hell, it would be smaller than the space of this box. “So,” he said mildly, “you say he was very much strangled.”

The tick-tock beat of her heart was suddenly very loud. “Well, I _think_ his neck was broken,” she said. “But with a face that purple, and the tongue black and hanging out like that, I’m not sure.” Her voice was closer to ‘hoarse’ than ‘normal’. “There could have been a gunshot wound in there. Might have missed it.”

He hummed again. “So, this makes it the third case.”

“ _So_?” she repeated after him.

He shrugged, languishing down in his seat. He was too tall to stretch comfortably, and the adjustment button seemed jammed. Out of the corner of her eye, Gaby watched him pretend he didn’t mind. “ _So_ , I wonder what happened to that nifty handgun of his. He was certainly fond of it when he came into my room in the Grand Plaza, all broody and intent to kill. And he _definitely_ took some unsportsmanlike pot-shots at your car with it on the night we all met.”

“The night when he took my car apart as a favour to the scrapyard workers.”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

The sight of a slanted roof, wooden sign and badly parked cars had never filled Gaby with more relief. She threw in a burst of speed, and slid the Colt into an empty corner of the parking lot before Solo could finish that thought. The challenge was clear in her face. The hum reverberated low in his throat, but he said nothing.

Rummaging through the car produced one battered suitcase containing a few light clothes and a woman’s watch. Solo carried it as casually as his own as they made their way to the motel’s front desk. The clerk peered at them from over the bags under his eyes and scribbled their details into the ledger.

“How many nights?” he asked in Dutch.

“Two,” said Gaby at the same time Solo said, “Three,” with a hopeful blush.

Grunting, the clerk disappeared under the desk, and some keys jangled speculatively. The phone shrilled, a single harsh ring that sliced through the air, as sharply authoritative as Waverley’s beckoning finger.

***

Sweat was drying in salt crystals on Gaby’s skin in the Lisbon sun. The window had started leaving scratches on her telephoto lens, her knees knotting and her back going numb from hours spent behind flowery curtains. On the other side of the glass, there was a different suburban neighbourhood depending on the time of day: middle-aged men chained to briefcases climbing into their modest cars, young girls bribing children with gold-foiled wrapped candy slipped into their schoolbags, flat shoes grinding into the pavement as working women dragged themselves home, and soldiers and native braves rushing back from the playground, brandishing sticks and chalk. Buried among familiar faces were other watchers with garrottes sewn into coat sleeves and cyanide pills in the aspirin bottles folded against their palms.

Jasmine tea, fragrant and swirling thickly with flavours, was running low in the pot by the window. Across the street, the mark’s battered blue car was slumped at the kerb. Two days ago, its tyre had blown with the force of a gunshot, and its owner hadn’t been seen outside since. A ghost had lurked in the cellar, barely visible from street level unless you pressed your face up against the bars. Coming fresh off patrol, Solo had reported the emigration of a mattress and a record player as well.

Earlier that morning, the mark had run out of toilet paper.

The radio crackled at Gaby’s elbow. “You are,” drawled a know-it-all voice softly, “very distracting when you scheme so loudly.”

Minutes later, the door to their rented house closed with a small click. Disguised in the gardening hat and summer whites of a perennial resident, Gaby didn’t need to look both ways before crossing the street. _First contact_. The suddenness of her move sent shadows scrambling from below the edges of rooftops and the insides of car trunks.

She scratched the tip of her nose, waiting for the mark to answer her hammering knock. Shadows seamlessly pulled themselves into new formations while she absently hummed a darling of the Portuguese radio under her breath.

No one came.

Abandoned plants were curling in their boxes around the house, new leaves struggling to push past withered ones. Overfed on sun, they gasped for water. The brim of the hat shielded Gaby’s face as she leaned down on one knee to poke at the flowerbeds. They were so dry that the soil would fissure in another day. Understanding sucker-punched her just as a muffled thump and crash rang out from behind the door.

“ _Poshyol ty_ ,” a woman howled, burying it in _fuck_ s and _goddamnit_ s. Every nerve in Gaby’s body seized up at the sound of it. “Come in,” said the mark, audibly wincing with each word. “Just—just push it open—”

Balanced on the threshold of the house, she eyed the doorknob as if the brass was red hot.

“Clumsy fuck,” the voice was saying, “tripping over—”

It was so good that Gaby tasted bile. If she’d had a very different life, she wouldn’t have known the sound was pre-recorded. Practised and repeated take after take until the muzzle of a gun was tattooed on the speaker’s temple. Until it became the perfect bait. Gaby’s knee hovered just inches above the pressure plate she was standing on. One step and she’d be ashes.

The hat quivered in her grasp when she pulled it off. The ground reverberated with Solo’s running tread. And she hoped that Illya was still watching, that he could taste the hatred in the sweat beading down her neck, her savage victory when she survived to keep coming after him.

*

Oleg was a ghost that brooded at the back of the room and eavesdropped sullenly on Waverley’s briefing sessions. Everyone elected, by silent consensus, never to bring him up. Saunders was fair game because no one needed to ask how Waverley knew the things he knew about the CIA man. Or at least, the ignoring part had been easy until Gaby received a gift from him.

In the wake of Istanbul, Oleg had sent a white wreath with a card: “ _Thank you for returning him to us_.”

Gaby had sealed Illya’s engagement ring in a blue pillbox and sent that back too.

“Flowers were always his signature,” Waverley had said, face clouding over with brief nostalgia. “When he was getting too old for active duty, he started mixing the essential oils from his wife’s flower garden to make interestingly potent poisons. Wiped out a whole rebellious Cartography department with it once.”

“And could it be,” said Solo, picking up the thread over bacon and bandages at a breakfast table in New York, “that he encouraged his successors to follow his example?”

Gaby’s toes curled painfully inside her fluffy slippers.

“Oh yes. Yes, certainly. Versatile young men, all, but each… with a special gift. Kuryakin, for instance, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but taken quite well to the manual aspect of things.”

“He does know how to aim that toy gun.”

Gaby had just rolled her shoulders deeper into a slouch and reached for Solo’s drink. “He nearly throttled a Central Committee worker when he was fifteen.” The detail had been in the subterranean of Illya’s file, less than a footnote. But there was no way she wouldn’t have known, not when she had scoured the document under ultraviolet light, searching for the most inadvertent of clues left by the men who had created him. “He found the man ‘with’ his mother.”

In a passing trick of the light, Solo’s eyes widened, but then his face was impassive again. “It’s a callback.”

Waverley made a small noise at the back of his throat that suggested he disapproved of an espionage professional using such laymen’s terms.

Gaby said flatly, “They’re using his anger issues and his past to motivate him. And using their programming to control him.”

“Clever.” The laughter lines crinkled at the corners of Solo’s eyes, matching his grimace. “It’s the perfect assassin. I’d be a lot more impressed if it weren’t trying to kill us.”

*

Sever years ago, Grushenka Zidislav had traded rocket science for obscurity; even Waverley was surprised when her photo was punched on the liquor license of a pub at the bottom of Dublin. When Gaby and Solo reached the place, they found ‘absent-minded evil professor’ etched into everything from the termites burrowing audibly in the furniture to the half-open bottles abandoned on the shelves.

The impression spilled over into the cramped and filthy room above the bar; someone else might not have been able to imagine how a family had lived in it for three years. Now, there was only one sign of life left. Gaby strode across the floor and ripped a piece of paper off the window.

When she shoved the note at Solo, his forehead creased in mild concern.

“ _Not even close_ ,” he read aloud carefully. “Could it be that Peril’s handwriting has gotten worse?”

They spent the night up there, guns placed within easy reach on the floor. In their cat and mouse game for not-so-innocent lives, their only hope was that the note was a taunt, not a postscript. As they ransacked the pub for clues to the Zidislavs’ location, a part of Gaby kept hoping that they’d come up empty. The most obvious reason for the note was that the KGB didn’t know where the mark was either, and the two of them were expected to lead Illya right to her.

She had read the dossier on the scientist who had put her infant son in a knapsack and escaped Kiev in the cargo car of a passenger train. Zidislav left her husband behind because another person would slow her down, and they executed him for it. At the rate at which they were going, Gaby had a good estimate of the ‘lucky few’ who escaped the Iron Curtain right through the government’s fingers. She was close to getting an exact number because Illya wouldn’t stop until all of them were dead.

Solo retrieved a sealed bottle from under the bar and dribbled its contents into two dirty glasses. “Not for the first time, I appreciate how the weapon _is_ the message.” He flapped the note between two fingers, and smiled wryly. “There’s a nice irony to their choice of operative. It’s almost… personalised.”

Gaby knocked back her glass and reached for the bottle. “Nice to know he’s thinking of us,” she grumbled.

She had found their only clue in a crack where the floor met the wall. Obscured by the heavy radiator, the hiding place was so small that only a child’s hand could have fit inside. Whoever had searched the room before their arrival had left no stone unturned: floorboards had been ripped apart, mouseholes forcibly widened. But he hadn’t known where a scared and lonely child might secret something precious.

It was a grainy photograph, folded over and over again into a tiny square, of a clapboard house. An apple-faced boy was peeking over the top of the fence, desperately trying to hold on until the shutter fell. On the reverse side, someone had scribbled a name and an old date. The clandestine holiday treat.

Solo shook his head almost pityingly. “If I know our Peril, he’s going to drive up the road in a windowless van.”

Gaby gave him enough credit to believe he’d at least put a mattress in the back. “He could be driving that van anywhere in Europe right now. What are the odds of beating him there?”

He looked vaguely thoughtful. “We _could_ go as the bird flies.”

 

“BIRDS,” Gaby was screaming over the whine of the seaplane, “CAN’T FLY FOR SHIT.”

Solo was invisible under a pair of goggles and the white sheet that his face had become. He looked ready to be airsick, but didn’t exactly dare because the wind was treating projectiles a bit badly at the moment.

“REMIND ME,” she asked, “WHY WE COULDN’T HIRE A PILOT?”

Solo’s hands were claws around the controls of the plane. “They were—” Shrieking wind and the sensation of all the blood doing jumping jacks in her head. “Only too happy—to be rid—of the plane. They—weren’t—climbing _inside_!”

The Irish countryside wobbled and wove out of sight under them, patches of green and blue giving way to clouds and sky.

Gaby could only hope that they’d crash land on a certain blond giant. With their luck, he’d probably wear the wreckage like an aviator’s scarf.

 

They touched down in Cornwall where a little man waited for them. He was slouched in the box seat of an apple cart, munching on his own wares while his horses lazily flicked at flies. Gaby wiped the soot out of her eyes and blinked blearily up at Solo, who was busy picking bits of seaplane out of his clothes. Her German accent was smokier than usual when she glowered and politely suggested that the cart driver might lend them his plough-horses for a while. Strictly on a bailment basis, very temporary.

When she realised that embers were curling around her bomber jacket, she took it off and stamped the fire out underfoot. Solo grimaced when he discovered stray wing in his overly gelled hair. The farmer threw in the apples, gratis.

 

They landslided into St. Ives just as they lost the last of the sun. From then on, it was turning the horses loose and licking themselves down into presentable, less conspicuous shades of themselves. They couldn’t afford to tip off passers-by or startle the boy in the photograph. He was somewhere, told to play indoors and be good, tamping down all his excitement that they were on holiday again. He looked at his seashell collection every morning, where it sat on a jar under the firmly boarded-up windows. While the sea roared distantly outside and voices chattered and sailed past, he read and re-read the adventures of the cocker spaniel who befriended a boy lost on the beach. He didn’t know that his mother used to design rockets for the Soviets, and that underneath the shabby fisherman’s cottage, there was a cellar barred by a heavy wooden door.

Well, he didn’t use to know.

The rafters were held aloft by toothpick-like pillars, but the shack was in shambles. Blood was drying on the corner of the traitor’s mouth, her body lying like a dropped marionette.

Gaby’s rage and twisted-up grief wanted to punch out of her chest and rend her in two.

The only thing left standing was the wooden door, exposed because the wall hiding it had been torn off. There wasn’t even a scratch. A small voice, barely human, was hiccoughing sobs from the other side.

*

There was nothing to talk about at three in the morning when the lights went out, and a scrap of blanket tried to keep them warm. The curve of Gaby’s back pressed into the hot line of Solo’s body. There was no music, no words, in the two-room apartment in which they passed the night. If she let him put his arms around her, he would shudder with how hard she was shaking. It was all sharp looks, dry eyes, memorisation of transport routes and the familiar taste of bile.

“He made a mistake.”

She should have been saying, _Thank god_ , but her mouth was full of ash. “I have it.”

It was nothing more than a balled-up piece of paper, dropped through a hole in a pocket. They could only guess at how the pocket tore; the undersides of Vladislav’s fingernails were dried black. What might have been lint unfolded into a ticket stub. _Band Box_. It was from a dry cleaner.

***

London was bright blue skies and cars practically driving atop pavements. The address of the dry cleaner had brought them to a hole in the wall masquerading as an Indian restaurant. Solo looked straight ahead through his aviators and strode into the place.

“I am Illya Nikolaivitch,” Gaby heard him say. “I am here for many black garments. Some with no neck. Some—”A great fortifying breath. “—With even less neck.”

Meanwhile, Gaby pulled the brim of her workman’s cap low, slumped her shoulders in the nondescript dirty white overalls, and walked past the open back door.

Steam and the smell of something basting in cooking oil choked her nearly at once. “Hot!” someone yelled, shoving past her with a boiling basin balanced in his bare hands.

Through the hurricane of activity, Gaby dodged the fish cook who was spurting scales and brandishing knives everywhere and slipped between the dishwashers.

“Out of the way,” snarled a man, hidden behind a pair of tattered potato sacks. In his hurry, his elbow knocked Gaby into a metal door, which opened suddenly from the other side, sending her sprawling.

She grabbed at the first thing she could reach: the errant doorman had propped his hand against the frame, holding the door half-open. Her fingers dug into his forearm as she swung herself out from under him. In that fleeting second, he shot into rigidness, the muscles going dangerously taut, and she knew she had him. She kept walking, smacking into people, weaved around their curses, and used every person in that overcrowded, overheated space between them to lose her pursuer. But she always knew he was so close that he could trip on the back of her heels.

“Oi, Piotr, where are you—”

He didn’t answer.

Gaby’s pulse was jammed like a time bomb in her throat, eyes locked on the double doors of the kitchen, a hundred miles away. When she burst through them into the narrow corridor outside, she gave up all pretence and began to run like hell.

The floor tiles became a blur under her feet as she pushed blindly around the corner, running straight through the office on the other side. She kicked a chair under the doorknob, heard a bang just as she was rolling out the window. Her chin jerked over her shoulder in a single involuntary backwards glance, and all she saw was his face, a grim mask.

She didn’t pause to breathe. She cut across the space between the restaurant and the next building. A maintenance stepladder was propped against the side, and she pounded up it, feeling it sway with her every step. The first storey window dangled an arm’s length above her head. She jumped for it, and felt a large hand swipe at her ankle just as she heaved out of reach. The stepladder hit the ground with a metallic clang and a meaty thump, but she was crawling through the window into the flat.

Distant footfalls of thunder echoed outside the door. She fumbled it open, stumbling into the staircase outside. She could hear him get steadily closer. She hurtled up the stairs, lungs already starting to burn, and she thought there was no stopping. Doors slammed, bolts flew, a guttural-accented voice turned unintelligible behind her. She never looked back, terrified that if she did, she wouldn’t recognise the thing close enough to haul her down. She hit the door to the roof palms-first, staggering onto the empty expanse of concrete.

London splayed all around her like a shabby patchwork quilt, paint faded from the tops of houses and washing flapping on nylon lines. She didn’t stop until she was at the parapet, fists clenched around it as she measured the steep drop below. The nearest building was too far away to jump. She slowly turned around to face the man who had followed her up there.

Kuryakin stood locked at attention. His bare hands were smeared with grime, his hair wild. His breath came out in cold, ragged puffs, and every inch of him seemed to tremble. He was looking at her the way a man looked at a desperate mirage.

From over his shoulder, a familiar voice crisply said, “We had a good run, Peril. But it’s over.” There was no ostentatious cock of the hammer. Kuryakin had been in this position enough times to know the gun without seeing it.

 

Gaby knew this was her cue. She knew what her line should be. _On the ground_. _Sit on your hands_. She’d heard the police say it too many times, watched the fear flicker behind her father’s eyes as men in heavy boots and clinking guns stamped through the garage. In three minutes, Illya Kuryakin had erased a whole year from her life. When she regarded him now, it was without pity. The man she had known, the man she had trusted, the man she’d felt she could share a future with, he wasn’t in front of her.

Waverley had always known how this would end. Only she had fooled herself into believing their mission had anything to do with bringing him home. All it was, was bringing a murderer to some kind of justice.

“He’s not listening, Solo.”

And in the fraction of a second it took for Solo’s gaze to shift to her, Kuryakin ducked. He moved faster than a lizard startled into flight, hitting the ground and rolling to his feet before Solo’s bullet met its mark. In a blink, he had disappeared over the edge of the roof.

Solo sprung into motion, vaulting over the parapet after him. Kuryakin was already halfway down, and the last Gaby saw was him clinging, spiderlike, to the side of the building. Gripping a window by his fingernails, he was staring up at her, as if she was all he could see. His hand stretched upwards, frozen midair as if she still had time to catch it.

Illya let go, and plummeted soundlessly to the ground.

 

The light of the tracker glowed in Gaby’s fist, an evil red eye pulsing through her fingers. She had followed Solo’s signal across town to an office building that looked vaguely condemned. A uniformed guard leaned against the chain-link entrance, his newspaper folded to the funnies. It took a fistful of bills from Solo for the guard to gesture at her to pass on.

to took her to a tin-roof shack leaning against an even worse-looking office building.

“Nice security,” she muttered. She wasn’t complaining that Illya had overpaid for the place, so much as she was wary of being overcharged for a trap.

“Let’s just say I… explained to him that his one tenant isn’t coming back, pre-deposit or no pre-deposit, and his next visitor will be said former tenant’s employers come to scrub away the evidence. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I explained all of this.”

Solo led her into a precarious-looking shack leaning against the building. It was supposed to house maintenance equipment, but blankets and tin mugs indicated that maintenance men often spent the night in there and never moved out. Solo unerringly sought out and flipped open the trapdoor. It opened into a treacherously narrow flight of stairs. It wasn’t exactly prime real estate, and Gaby sort of saw why the security was what it was.

Bare bulbs dangled on strings in the cellar. In the windowless gloom, they could barely make out a table and mountains of newspapers. Gaby toed aside some of the mountains of rubbish (a bicycle pump, a book of Walt Whitman poetry, a cheese grater) to look for clues. Each transient inhabitant seemed to have left behind something for the next.

“Not even a turtleneck,” sighed Solo. “He risked far too much in trying to come back here. What was he after?”

There wasn’t even a chess set, let alone sophisticated technology with which Kuryakin kept in touch with the Moscow Merchants. There were newspapers in more languages than she read; some were yellowed, others were soggy from holding fish and chips. Gaby started peeling them apart and holding them to the light, trying to decipher anything he might have been interested in.

“No vodka. Damn it.” Solo was running his scanner over every surface in sight, regarding the readings with mild disappointment.

A laugh threatened to rise in Gaby’s throat? _Vodka_. The most that this place had was a crumpled pile of blankets where someone may have slept. The makeshift bed had been kicked into the smallest, darkest corner of the underground hideout. The wall was padded unevenly with bricks, always threatening to collapse over the sleeper’s head. A brick near the bottom already looked halfway there.

Gaby knelt to scrabble it loose, but it was stuck. Why had Kuryakin—especially Kuryakin in a hurry—not torn this out to get at the hiding place beyond?

With Solo’s help, she finally tugged the brick free, exposing what it used to hide. A small box was glued to the side of the brick. _Blue_. It opened easily, the hinges loose. It had been opened and closed many times before.

“Gaby.” Solo’s voice was very distant. “Is that—?”

She held it up to the light. It was small and radiated outwards, a stylised flower. The centre pulsed blue like Illya’s eyes.

Solo’s breath came low and heavy. He was speechless. Something warm was running down Gaby’s finger, but she couldn’t put the engagement ring down. She sucked at the bleeding cut, but the ring rolled in the centre of her palm, innocent and meaningless.

“Why does he have this?” she said, her voice harsh and taut. “Why would he keep it?”

“Maybe,” Solo began apologetically.

“Don’t tell me it’s a keepsake. It’s not. He doesn’t remember.”

Solo shrugged. “Maybe he wishes he could.”

*

It didn’t take long for Gaby to start cursing the ring. Solo found a plaster to put around her finger, but the ring stayed buried in her pocket. As far as anyone was concerned, she was never putting it on again. This had been a small point of contention between them: she’d been all for throwing it in the Thames, while Solo believed it was a nice souvenir.

“Keep it,” he urged, uncharacteristically soft. The memory of death and destruction must have been distracting him. “You know it means something.”

That was why, come dinner, it was still burning a hole in her pocket.

“Maybe you could wear it on a chain around your neck,” suggested Solo, oblivious to her glare. He was obviously letting this ‘being listened to’ thing go to his head.

 

Gaby brought it up over the secure phone line as coolly as a sleight-of-hand trick during the next briefing; she was rewarded by an audible click, the line going dead. Two days later, they motored out of the city for a lift to the next leg of their mission. Dark glasses squaring off his face, suit as starched as his British upper lip, Waverly himself was breezing across the green plain to greet them. He was favouring his right and his crow’s feet were slightly deeper this morning. But he lounged in his seat in the helicopter and snapped his fingers, and the world moved on his command.

“Microdot, eh? And you’re sure it was for Kuryakin, and not, let’s say, the former Czech janitor who cleaned the place?”

His underling carefully placed the white circle, meticulously retrieved from the underground hovel, under a reader. The man’s frown was already evident around the lens.

“Sir?” he questioned, slightly betrayed. “This is a shopping list.”

“Balenciaga or bowties?” asked Solo from the corner, suddenly alert.

“Germaniums.” The underling’s frown was punishing. “White germaniums and a black suit. Possibly Park Avenue, to be supplied from the warehouse of confiscated wares the KGB maintains,” he added before Solo could ask.

“So who’s dead?” said Gaby, stirred from her stupor.

The underling glanced at her sharply but Waverley was already smiling knowingly into his chest. “Information has come into our hands that in three weeks, a Politburo member will be laid to rest. He’s currently alive and kicking, of course, but years ago, he had a certain information capsule drilled into a certain bone of his body. The quietest way to extricate that is once he’s interred. Kuryakin, I see, will be doing the honours.”

The unsteady judder of the helicopter didn’t shake Waverley’s hand as he poured scotch highballs at the exact same length in three glasses. He murmured something about the poor quality of crockery aboard agency transportation; budgets tended to favour heavy machinery over class. “Don’t you think so, Miss Teller?”

Gaby snorted in assent.

“I thought it would lend a certain gravitas to the occasion. Inspire Brentwood here to put his thinking cap on, and all that. It’s not every day we get missions as delicate as this one.”

Solo’s smile widened across his face, all bland and cheap faux-interest. Her thumb rubbed the spot on her other hand where Illya’s ring had left a pale band, and waited for the axe to fall. She felt it grazing the nape of her neck, cold and jagged with rust.

“How would you like to lead the charge to Moscow, Miss Teller?”

She lifted her head, meeting Waverley squarely in the eye. “I’d like that very much.”

***

Gaby pushed her cheap novel into the crease of her seat, and scraped her fingernails close to her palms as her first Aeroflot flight began to descend. With her shoulders sloped down and teeth clenched, the itch on her thumb began to sear. Beside her, Solo had reclined his seat to full capacity, every bit the obnoxious Viennese tourist on a misguided work-holiday trip. A snore rippled his lips every fifteen seconds.

In fifteen minutes, her carry-all would be fisted at her side, thumping against her leg with each shuffle of her orthopaedic shoes. Solo would sail on ahead, his beer-padded belly leading the way. Their passports would be manhandled by the graciously smiling officer at the Immigration counter, who spoke Austrian and German as fluently as them. His welcomes wouldn’t waver when he noticed that her gestures, her turn of phrase, made her the wrong kind of German, and he’d send them on their way. They’d never reach their destination after that.

Twenty minutes later, they were shivering on the kerb, glued to the tail end of a long taxi queue. The wind buffeted Gaby in grey waves, trying to knock her off the pile of suitcases she was hunched down on. Solo was optimistically waving rouble notes at every car that zipped past, but despite the way his smile wavered and he bounced on the balls of his feet, he hovered close enough to trip over her. Moscow had already started to blur into Lisbon, into St. Ives, Amsterdam, Istanbul: bad tastes at the back of her mouth, replaced before sunset.

The day grew colder before a cab finally deigned to brake before them. Stiffening, Gaby glanced down the queue to assure herself that there wasn’t a high-ranking politician who would right of way through those black doors. The driver had rolled his window down a thin gap to preserve the overheated interior, and snapped in Russian, “Where to?”

Solo replied in the same language, his vowels butchered by his new Austrian accent. The driver’s frown deepened, but he let them clamber into the backseat anyway, luggage thumping everywhere.

“Is that really where you want to go?” asked the driver, eyes presumably on the road.

“Depends,” said Solo mildly, lapsing into his crisp English, “if you think that’ll increase the fare.”

In the rearview mirror, the driver’s cheek twitched irritably. “Maybe,” he said, this time in English, “you like to go to hotel. The little lady, she is exhausted. Perhaps you take care too.”

Solo glanced askance at Gaby, eyebrows raised.

Her shoulders jerked in a shrug. She tipped her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. “Is there any Bison vodka?”

 

 _I’d like that very much_. Solo had practically reverberated with the words as he slopped _coq au vin_ around in the cooking pan. Gaby, who fitted neatly into a spindly blue-painted chair at the kitchen table, rested her chin atop her knees and watched him dispassionately. Once, that chair had been a part of a set, but this was the sole survivor of sales or thefts. For the two of them, it would be a long wait until their bullets and their fake visas came together. Infiltrating Moscow was very far away.

Waverley had dropped out of radio contact again, leaving them to rent rooms in a dilapidated East Berlin apartment building that was completely distinct from the dilapidated apartment building they had used in 1963. For starters, this one had a bigger TV. The news had crackled in the background, while she let Solo stew over an open flame.

“Do you know,” he said, as he flicked salt into the dish, “that I came up with twelve reasonably plausible alternatives over chopping onions? Eleven of those involve Peril doing as all transgressing lovers do, and coming to us, instead of us going to him.”

“Then, I want to hear the twelfth.”

A sharp sizzle of meat was the only answer. She knew he’d been bluffing about the twelfth. This silence was infuriating because they’d had this conversation before: the risks, the risks that involved dying, the hypnotic quality of a certain someone’s ‘I’m a mindless cog in the killing machine and yet inexplicably attractive’ look, and the fact that they were sitting in East Germany, sipping ditchwater and downing mouse-sampled bread rolls. Gaby had run out of ways to tell him that she just didn’t care. _I am my own woman_. She was going to Moscow and that was it.

“Did you ask yourself why?” There was the hiss of diced vegetables being added to the pan, but Solo’s voice was unwavering. “What you’re doing this for?”

She didn’t get angry at the presumptuousness of the question. Picking at a whorl on the tabletop, she said, “Because it’s the right thing to do. I have a duty.”

 

In the wintry Russian cold, the cab jerked to a halt. “We are here,” snapped the driver.

Wrought-iron spikes fenced in a grey cemetery, and all that was visible was an expanse of wintry grass and the distant shapes of mourners. Solo unfolded a wad of bills and leaned over the driver’s seat, dangling them limply from his fingers. “I noticed you didn’t switch on the metre. I hope you’re not planning on overcharging us.”

The driver’s gaze slid downwards, regarding the supposed Viennese tourist’s painstakingly manicured hand with some disgust. An index finger hammered at the leather of the steering wheel. “Of course not,” he said at last, and slowly took the money.

“You should count them,” said Solo cheerfully, falling back in his seat. “I’d advise you to be careful about pointing out any short-changing, though. My lovely wife here has a gun pointed at where the centre of your spinal cord should be.”

In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes flicked from one side to the other. It rested on Gaby, and didn’t move. She steadily stared back. The Mauser was cradled comfortably in her palm.

“You are not tourists.”

“No, and you’re a shit driver, but glass houses, my friend.”

“I am _not_ —”

“Gaby, darling, isn’t that a rather hurtful thing to say to someone who once recovered this gentleman’s wristwatch?”

A gasp rattled low in the driver’s throat. There was the scrape of rough fingers on bare skin. Those eyes turned black. Solo smiled apologetically and gently raised the watch. He held it gingerly by the worn leather strap, carefully avoiding contact with any piece of cold metal.

Illya twisted, ready to kill, and Gaby yanked the trigger.

 

A domestic dispute had been tantruming in the apartment above for days; disembodied voices screamed abuses in German, undercut by broken furniture. A doctor huffing and puffing as he hauled himself up the stairs of their apartment building. Gaby had listened to the couple fade into an indistinct babble as she lay on the sofa, arms slotted tightly at her sides as if she was awash on the sea in a coffin. There was the gradual thump of the doctor leaving the flat and traipsing downstairs to knock on their door.

The sound of Solo’s cool, insouciant interrogation buzzed like speck-like insects head-butting the bulb overhead. And then the doctor was kneeling beside the sofa, digging his fingers into the inside of her wrist and making a noise of small satisfaction. Her whole hand spasmed in his grasp, a microcosm of the way her body had been all day.

“What is it you want, Miss Teller?” His voice, brittle and Bavarian, had brushed beside her ear.

She squeezed her eyes shut and wanted the world to go away. “My job. Just get me off this sofa so I can do my damn job.”

“And what is your job, Miss Teller?”

The answer that swam to the forefront of her mind—a tattered national flag, children crammed on the back of a workhorse wading through mud on the way to a small school, a scratched medal broken in half—made no sense to her.

“It was insidiously done,” said the doctor right over head as if she no longer existed to him. Solo’s hand had closed over hers, suppressing the shivers as tightly as she was. “You’re lucky she was exposed to a small quantity. The mechanism in the ring is crude. Hastily made. A supplement to the main instrument.”

“The watch.”

“Possibly. If the file is correct. I have not seen it.”

“And the poison? How, exactly, does it work?”

The doctor’s nostrils had audibly flared, his breath jumpstarting with excitement. “It renders the recipient susceptible to suggestion, you see. The instrument pricks the recipient at controlled intervals, releasing calculated doses of the chemical. The blood carries it swiftly to the brain, each dose reinforcing the atrophy from the previous ones. Administered over the period of time I suspect it has been, the slightest suggestion will be treated as his command. If not the watch, I’ve seen the ring, Herr Solo. He handled it often, and it poisoned him each time.”

 _You don’t want to wear this kind of shame_.

***

The lights of the Savoy left golden beams glinting through Waverley’s hair, as he walked briskly into the dining room. Along the way, he had carelessly divested himself of his hat and his coat, and he paused only at the correct square on the chess grid of the floor. His companion was waiting placidly, fingers interlocked on the table before him. Waverley lowered himself into his seat with the ease of a man without knee pains, and quirked his lips in a silent greeting.

“Always a pleasure to have our little chats, Oleg.” A wince skittered across Oleg’s face at the pronunciation, but Waverley soldiered on: “I do apologise for the mess that happened in your backyard.”

Oleg generously waved it away. “Two coffees, cream and one sugar each. Will petit fours tempt you? Petit fours then.” When the orderly had glided off, he frowned down at the cage of his hands. “Operatives are replaceable. Yes, even ones like Illya Nikolaivitch.”

“Because you have Nikolai Kuryakin,” suggested Waverley mildly.

“Because I have Nikolai Kuryakin.” Oleg’s mouth pulled away from his teeth in a feral grin. “You may think it old—clichéd—framing the father to motivate the son. But his every minute, his every move, was written before he made it. His future is in his past.” He paused for a trace to let this literary reference sink appropriately into the moment.”

“And the current, ah, debacle?”

Oleg gave an expressive shrug. “I am one man. The KGB has only so many resources. We are experiencing a period of some… shortages. Occasionally, I loan my operatives to Department 13. Sometimes, they are returned to me in pine boxes. It is an acceptable risk.”

“Until, of course,” said Waverley, as patient as the prompter in the wings of a theatre.

“Your communication. It was very timely. No doubt, in due course, I would have been alerted to Department 13’s intentions to have my own man kill me. But by then, it would be too late for my particular… preparations. With Illya Nikolaivitch dead, some of this will be worthless.”

Waverley made an assenting noise, exuding his hearty belief in ‘caveat emptor’ and all that. Oleg reached a hand into his pocket, but his hesitation was calculated.

“I have with me everything you need to know about Nikolai Kuryakin’s internment in the Gulag. It will mean nothing to you without my assistance. And you know exactly how to secure my assistance.”

That Waverley certainly did. “You have my word. And yours comes highly recommended.” Adrian Saunders was hardly the lesser of the two proverbial evils. Still, it was useful to have an ambitious friend in Oleg’s position. “Should we shake on it?” He extended his hand across the surface of the table.

Oleg clasped it and closed a microdisc against Waverley’s palm.

*

The bullet lay at the bottom of a tin mug, distorted by the blood dissipating in the water. Illya’s eyes, wide open, stared at the ceiling. There was no quiet in the communal apartment he had been staying at before the cemetery. The room across the hall was blasting commercials for fur-lined clothing at an attractive discount. A pedal-operated Singer sewing machine jackhammered away somewhere else. Gaby perched on the window sill closest to the bed, and breathed steadily in and out through her nose.

She had been warned, but looking at the pinpricks circling his wrist, wide as the span of her palm, she didn’t need to be.

“You should stay hydrated,” she said aloud. There was no answer. “I’m going to get you a glass of water.” Nothing. “I promise I’ll be right back.”

The kitchen was thankfully empty when she slipped inside. The pitcher clinked against the glass as she poured with unsteady hands. Through the thin walls, she could hear a couple fighting in a pitch practised to be drowned under the TV. The pad of bare feet on the tiles was just like that as well. Gaby hooked a finger around the handle of the cutlery drawer. It would fly out on its ball bearings at the slightest tug.

“Illya. Did you want something?”

She heard the hoarse roll of his breath from his chest. “That,” he said softly, “is not my name.”

“Isn’t it?” She gripped the glass harder. “Everyone has a name. Yours must be something.”

“No. I have no need for—”

“Illya Nikolaivitch,” she said, injecting all the tenderness and familiarity anyone should have used when saying that aloud. She turned around, glass in hand, mouth shaping a rueful smile. _Trying not to get lost_. The floor was icy-cold when she took a step towards him. “Here.”

He didn’t move to take it from her. “The man you look for is gone.”

She tipped her head back to look at him. “He’s not gone.” Her knee was curving under her, ready to launch her body in fight or flight. “I’m looking right at him.” The line of his throat moved in an almost imperceptible swallow. “He’s right here with me.”

“Illya.” She reached carefully for him, skimming the fabric of his shirt between two fingers. His body heat was almost palpable when he sucked in his breath, surprised despite himself. “You know me, Illya.” She bunched a corner of the shirt in her hand, half-tugging, half-lifting, exposing the gauze taped over the wound in his side. His skin was sliced with healed-over scars, a white ridge joining hipbone to sternum. “You’d know me anywhere.”

She pulled herself up on tiptoe, and pressed the cold side of the glass to the centre of his chest. His shirt dragged itself entirely out of the waistband of his trousers, a white flag crumpled between them. His hand wrapped around hers, yanking her higher. She fumbled for balance, just as his other arm went around the small of her back, pulling her flush against him. _Zvyozdochka moya_.

In the infinitesimal space between them, she could smell the woodsy scent of him, hear his heart pounding. His shirt fell out of her grasp, her hand circling his good side for support.

“What is in the water?”

Her fingernails dug faintly into the taut hollow of his hipbone. “Antitoxin.” His instep was within easy reach. “You need to hydrate.”

Something dark and familiar clouded his sharp blue eyes when he looked at her. _Betrayal_. “You—there are ways not to give me choice in this.” _Fear_.

The shiver grazed the base of her spine, just below where his knuckle rested against her skin. “I know.” And she let go of the glass.

It dropped straight into his hand. For a second, his fingers quivered around it, and then he was tipping his head back, and downing the liquid in a smooth swallow. The bottom of the glass clinked on the kitchen counter. He scowled. “Tastes nothing like water.”

*

The wristwatch lay on the table, each tick of the second hand frantic like a metronome. Every fifth tick was cut off by the sound of Solo dropping some new item from his pockets: lipstick, Parker ink pen, Omega watch, and a pair of stockings still rolled-up at the top as if they’d been urged right off a woman’s warm legs. Stiff-backed in his Spartan chair, Peril leaned forward, face crumpling in horror.

Solo decided it wasn’t a bad look. It was certainly a welcome look after being subjected to two days of a whey stony mask, beaded with sweat, jaws grinding together hard enough to do serious enamel damage while Peril pretended he didn’t have any withdrawal-induced nervous tics. In fact, this was the first time Solo was seeing him like this: like there was someone home inside.

“I hope you don’t object to my choice of gifts,” he said, deliberately misinterpreting that look. “I even helped myself to some.” He extended his right foot; he was wearing wool-lined slippers inside his galoshes to survive the walk back to the apartment. “Call it a finder’s fee.”

“You _pilfered_ this,” said Peril, an accusing finger twitching while his hands were clamped around the chair in remarkable self-restraint. “You went to the American warehouse.”

Solo modestly dipped his chin to his chest. “It’s the only place in the city that supports the American economy. The fact that it’s exclusive to the senior-most KGB officials was a coincidence, not a perquisite.”

Illya reached for the stockings, the slide of his arm measured and rigid to avoid even the most accidental touch against his father’s watch. He rubbed it between two fingers almost contemplatively. “This is cheap nylon. You are losing your touch.”

Solo glanced very gently heavenward. “Everybody,” he sighed, “is a critic.”

***

Three figures stood in front of the department store, hands tucked deep into pockets, oushanka nestled over their heads, woollen scarves wrapped around their lower faces. They could have passed for tourists, trying to figure out how to navigate entry into the bazaar-like place without being crushed underfoot in the current stampede. None of them looked askance even at the strident sounds of a policeman redirecting traffic to let a ZiL limousine pass through to the Kremlin. The wind howled down the Red Square, burrowing through unprotected ears.

“There is a good safe house for us.” The man called it _yafka_ , which pedestrians did not throw about in casual conversation.

“But it’s in _Siberia_.”

“It is good place to stay.”

“Siberia, I’m afraid, is the sticking point for the lady.”

“I’m more concerned about the part where we get there while clinging to the underside of a train.”

“We can be arrested. That will get us there faster.”

“You know, I’m actually considering it. Speed has a lot to recommend itself when it comes to—”

“If you say ‘Siberia’ one more time, I’m going to scream.”


End file.
